


i always thought i might be bad (now i'm sure that it's true)

by tinysmallest



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, he doesn't WANT to die so i don't think a tw for suicide is necessary, he is in fact having just the WORST time, like the point is that he specifically DOESN'T want to even if his self-esteem is the absolute pits, set throughout the series and ending in early season four, spoiler alert he's not happy about it, steven's identity crisis takes a brand new twist!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23758708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinysmallest/pseuds/tinysmallest
Summary: When he was little, Steven thought his mother was something of an angel. When he got a little older, he looked into the light she blazed upon the world and felt the cold shadow her memory cast on him, the million and one ways he failed to measure up. By the time he confronted the fake image of his mother in her room, he wondered if he existed at all, if Rose Quartz's gem being wiped clean ofherhad truly left any room forhim,or if one day he would wake up andbeher, again. In that way, and in her looming memory, she had become his prison, a prison he? She? Had done to herself.But one day a video call gone wrong with Peridot and Lapis brings up a horrific second possibility: maybehewasherprison.
Relationships: Rose Quartz & Steven Universe
Comments: 2
Kudos: 101





	i always thought i might be bad (now i'm sure that it's true)

Steven remembered, only vaguely, the first time he saw his mother.

He was four, maybe five, and he sat on the floor in Mrs. Vidalia's garage, chubby little hands gooey with paint. There was music off to the side; his father, Steven supposed in hindsight looking back.

He was smacking his hands against a canvas, and he remembered that viscerally- the texture of the paint and of the canvas.

What he _really_ remembered, the thing he actively tried to hold onto, was his father's gentle voice calling him, and looking up, and Mrs. Vidalia and his dad pointing to the painting she'd just finished.

He remembered thinking she was the most beautiful lady he'd ever seen.

* * *

By the time he was ten he was enamored with her. She was something both adored and forbidden, something brought up only on special occasions or in hushed whispers or through slips of the tongue. He lived for more of her story, fed to him in piecemeal installments, and was grateful that his father gave him them so easily when it occurred to him to do so.

He wondered years later, if he'd just been more candid with his father, if he could have heard about her more frequently. At least from him.

She cried because she loved so much that seeing others in pain brought her pain. That made his heart jolt. That was just like him! He cared about everyone too, and it always hurt so much to see them hurt! He'd felt it just that day, even, watching Amethyst dance around the edges of the cliff face, the thudding of his heart matching her steps, tears burning his eyes at the thought of her falling.

But when push came to shove and she really did fall and get hurt, he couldn't do it. He couldn't seem to make himself cry. It was like hearing that his mother could cry tears that healed people had robbed him of all his own tears, despite the awful feelings welling in his stomach.

Why couldn't he do this one simple thing? He cried all the time! Pearl herself pointed it out! He was still such a dumb kid and he cried over everything, like commercials and snakes and ice cream. Why couldn't he cry over Amethyst getting hurt!?

And when he did finally cry, nothing happened. It wasn't his tears that saved her life. It was the other Crystal Gems.

He failed to cry. He failed to have any healing magic in his tears when he _did_ finally cry a hair ahead of it being too late. He failed his first mission at the Lunar Sea Spire. When he healed Connie's eyes and healed Lapis's gem, he thought he was finally making progress, only for it all to slip out of his fingers. A single silly lie was all it took to topple him? Really, Steven? No, instead he had to use tape to fix the geode. It was fine that Dad needed the tape, but Dad was human. He was a gem. _Mom_ wouldn't have needed tape.

Failed, failed, failed.

That night after the test (that he passed but didn't deserve to pass but, thinking back to the choice he'd made, maybe he'd passed the most important test of all, somehow?) he sat underneath her portrait and stared up at her, the soft moonlight pooling on the floor around him but not touching him, the wall where her portrait hung in the way, and felt very small.

He was never going to be as good as her.

He did try, though! He tried so hard! Sometimes it came naturally, like when he helped people, or was just nice to them, and they were nice back, and somewhere amid all the warmth and joy of friendship and family hummed a happy little thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something good about him despite everything.

Even if he was never as good as her, at least he had that.

* * *

Lately he wasn't sure if he existed.

During the day the thought felt far away most of the time, but every once in awhile at night he would remember the way Jasper looked at him, feel the stark, cold terror of her gaze freeze him from the inside out all over again. Sometimes it was the memory of when they first met. Sometimes it was her as Malachite. Sometimes it was her gaze shot back at him over her shoulder as she turned to face him, Lapis's horrified face just barely visible behind her.

But for the past week it was her eyes as they lost lucidity, teal spots and spikes overtaking her body. Her shriek.

A trembling hand touched his gem and then flinched back.

He wasn't sure when the idea occurred to him. Maybe it had always been there, buried deep inside him (buried, like the truth-) and recent events made it too big and too painful to ignore, like right now, in the otherwise peaceful quiet night.

Nobody knew what he was, exactly. Or what he needed.

How did they know he was even _him?_

He had Rose's gem. That's what they called it, sometimes. His mom's gem. Other times they called it his.

What if they were both right? How did Mom giving up her physical form even _work_ , exactly? And that's what they called, it, too- her physical form. Not her _life._ Her _physical form._

Gems didn't get a lot about humans, even the Crystal Gems, but he was pretty sure they used 'life' as an everyday word. If she gave up her _life_ to make him, wouldn't they say _that_ instead?

Heck, even Dad had said that phrase to him once! Did they just want to avoid the word 'die' that much?

Did they phrase it so specifically to avoid saying anything they didn't know was the absolute truth, so they would never technically lie to him?

Was she really gone completely?

_Sometimes, you even sound like her..._  
_Do you remember this place?_  
_Do you have **any** of her memories?_

Maybe the questions Pearl should have been asking were 'did you somehow wipe your own memory' and 'why did you do this to yourself.'

Shattered someone. She shattered someone. She shattered someone and now... where did that leave them all?

He (she? he? she?) wished for a lot of things, once. To know the Crystal Gems better, to be in control of his powers-

Powers, he realized with a startle one day as he erased a save file on his video game (and found himself idly wishing he could forget the game entirely so he could experience it fresh again) that he was supposed to be _growing into_ \- and wasn't that what she wanted? Wasn't deleting her own memory just... a real life version of what he'd just been doing? 

Erasing her save file to make room for a new one, to experience it fresh- to grow into her abilities and into the world instead of having it all foisted upon her.

Steven buried that game under everything else in his collection.

'Why did you do this to _us?'_

Steven (Rose?) had wished for a lot of things once, but now all she (he?) wished he (she?) had was an answer. 

* * *

A prison.

This was a new possibility, one he hadn't considered until he righted Connie's laptop and found to his intense relief that Lion had knocked it over onto the safe landing space of the couch.

In the cooldown over being grateful that Lion hadn't seriously damaged something so personal to his best friend and that Lapis was feeling okay after such a raw, sudden spike of terror had ruined her afternoon, Steven found himself feeling bad all over again about what Lapis had gone through. She was a little rough around the edges maybe, but she was a good person. She hadn't deserved that.

As much as dropping everything to get to the barn had been inconvenient, he couldn't begrudge her the reaction she'd had. That must have been so scary, to think someone was putting Steven through what she'd experienced. Her eyes always went hard and kind of foggy at the same time whenever she talked about it; it was no wonder she'd lost her mind just now. Being trapped in something for years and years, in a prison nobody could even see you in, god, he couldn't even imagine-

_W-where's your gem on this thing I-_

_Right here,_ he thought automatically to the memory of her scared voice, her frantic eyes, and he touched a hand to his gem as he closed Connie's laptop, and somewhere in the thought and the physical touch an awful, awful, connection was made.

Right here. Right here, in his belly. Where it had always been.

His gem. Her gem?

_How did giving up her physical form even **work?**_

What if it had in _exactly that way._ In exactly just insofar as her _physical_ form.

Nausea took over his stomach. A haze of fog settled into his head. Cold fingers gripped his heart and squeezed until there was no more air in his chest.

A gem's whole being is their gem. Their body is just hard light and magic. Giving up her physical form meant giving him her gem but did it mean she stopped existing? Gems didn't stop existing when they retreated into their gems to heal. They were still themselves, inside their gem. _Lapis didn't stop existing when she was embedded in the mirror; why would Rose stop existing when embedded in a human?_

_Was he **her** prison?_

He ran to the bathroom and threw up.

For the next few days he drifted in and out of a fog, smiling at cues, nodding through conversations. He didn't talk to Lapis, but he thought about her baseball bat, how the solution was to smash the mirror, the laptop. He closed his eyes in the shower and didn't touch his gem.

But eventually Steven found himself sitting in the bathtub, feeling too tired, too heavy to stand up. Had he taken his shower? What time was it? What _day_ was it? He didn't know the answer to any of those things.

After what must have been at least a week since the initial thought, he finally laid trembling fingers against the smooth surface of the jewel he had no right to be carrying around inside him. He traced the facets, watching the clear, brilliant pink gleam in the light. It was a little dull. He hadn't been keeping up with his daily grooming routine, giving it the attention he usually did. _If I polish it,_ he thought blearily, _my face will reflect in it, but that doesn't make it anymore mine._

_Actually won't that just make it a mirro-_

He gagged and clapped his hands over his mouth instead.

After a moment he eased his hands from his mouth and back to his gem, tracing his way down the sides to where the hard rock met his skin. He poked his belly a little, watching the way his finger made the indent in his roundness. He traced his way back from his flesh to the gem.

Flesh. Gem. Human. Magic. The mirror was smooth against the back of his hand. Ripping Lapis out had been hard.

He gripped his gem experimentally in one hand.

It was warm against his palm. It was always warm, even when the rest of him was cold, like after a long dip in the ocean when it was freezing, or a day outside playing in the snow. Somehow it was still always warm.

He set Lapis free. He should set Rose free, too.

_I can't._

His pulse, or maybe his gem, thudded against his hand.

_I can't._

He didn't know how he knew, but he knew that he needed this gem. Would removing it kill him? Would it erase his memory somehow? Split his consciousness in two? He didn't know. But he knew--maybe in the same way young humans know they need blood without being told--that he needed it. To pull it out would be to destroy his own existence, one way or another. He thought of how he flinched as Lapis's gem finally came free and the mirror jerked and spat shards everywhere, and his grip on the pink quartz in his stomach tightened.

He liked being alive. Or at the very least he liked his own consciousness. Liked being him. If asked if he loved himself he would answer without hesitation because of course everyone wanted to hear he did even if he didn't, but love and like could be two different things, right? He could like being himself the way humans liked having blood, and hearts, and lungs. It didn't mean he had to love his failures or his weird body or any number of things.

And besides, he _could_ love how he helped other people, how he was kind and gentle and how he tried to be good, how that affected others-

_Lapis's exhausted face, stumbling steps, the way she grabbed at his hands and smiled at him, weak and grateful..._

Except that was all a lie wasn't it? 

He couldn't take his gem out. He didn't _want_ to take his gem out. His breathing grew harder, faster, sweat rolling down his face the more he thought about pulling, the more his fingernails dug into the jewel, scraped against his gut, his soul. _He didn't want to take his gem out._

He didn't want to set her free.

He wasn't willing to break the mirror.

So he stood up, showered, dressed, crawled into bed, buried the whole night deep, deep under layers of quilts and _fine, fine, I'm fine, we're fine._

Three days later he heard the story of the gems kidnapping him ( _guys seriously why didn't you just talk to Dad,_ he groaned aloud in his head) and how all of them, Pearl specifically, so selflessly decided that Steven's life mattered more than Rose's wants. More than their wants. Her hand had touched his gem, but only seconds after her fingers tightened, she stopped. She could have had Rose back right then, but she stopped. Steven sat frozen through that part of the story. At least the whole thing had a gentle ending to soothe him a little. And wasn't it lovely, to think about how much they all grew!

After the general merriment and amusement had died down he excused himself to the bathroom to lift up his sweater and stare at what lay beneath. They didn't do it. They had no right to decide to do it, he supposed, not when it wasn't their lives in question. But he did.

He did and he still couldn't do it.

Selfish.

He was pretty sure that made him bad.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been picking at this for ages and ages because Youtube has been recommending me White Diamond's... speech? Verbal abuse tirade? At Steven for like, a solid month now, and I watch every single time, because it is _chilling as fuck_ both in just the possibilities she puts into the world (that thankfully aren't true but still, yikes) and in how it turns out she knew the whole time that Steven was Steven all along and just didn't care about ripping him apart if it got her Pink back.
> 
> Somewhere in all these rewatches of that scene I realized it's entirely possible Steven doesn't _just_ fear that he's somehow literally Rose with severe amnesia, and then I remembered Lapis and the mirror. I have no idea if Sugar did that parallel intentionally but Steven's a smart kid. He probably picked up on it himself.
> 
> And since my other wips are all about Steven and his dad and Greg and Rose, how about a story about Steven and his mom.


End file.
